04 March 2013

This is another A C Grayling-related post; turns out he has written
a new book. Defenders of religion will likely not be persuaded by the arguments
contained within Grayling’s latest work, but hopefully fence-sitting readers
will be convinced of the superior values of humanism. One such religious
sympathiser who clearly wasn’t impressed with Grayling’s book is Peter ‘brother-of-Christopher’
Hitchens. The younger Hitchens is in many ways the ideological opposite of his
more (in)famous brother. Here’s an excerpt from his review:

‘Atheism is to theism,’ Anthony Grayling declares, ‘as
not collecting stamps is to stamp-collecting’. At this point, we are supposed
to enjoy a little sneer, in which the religious are bracketed with bald, lonely
men in thick glasses, picking over their collections of ancient stamps in
attics, while unbelievers are funky people with busy social lives.

But the comparison is flatly untrue. Non-collectors
of stamps do not, for instance, write books devoted to mocking
stamp-collectors, nor call for stamp-collecting’s status to be diminished, nor
suggest — Richard Dawkins-like — that introducing the young to this hobby is
comparable to child abuse. They do not place advertisements on buses
proclaiming that stamp-collecting is a waste of time, and suggesting that those
who abandon it will enjoy their lives more.

The (by now clichéd) point that atheism is a religion like not collecting
stamps is a hobby was meant to demonstrate the absurdity of the claim that
atheists are as ‘dogmatic’ or ‘faithful’ as religious believers in
precisely the same way. That’s rubbish, of course. But Hitchens’s argument
– that the comparison is indeed inaccurate, but only because atheists are often mean
and obnoxious, unlike non-stamp collectors – sounds reasonable. I admit that immediately
after reading the passage quoted above, I nodded my head conceding that he had
a point.

But not so fast. Jerry Coyne wrote a post responding to Hitchens’s negative book
review, and found a serious flaw in his argument. Coyne rebuts:

At
first this sounds like a good riposte to Grayling—until you think about it for
a minute. If stamp collectors tried to force others to collect stamps, vilified
or condemned those who did not see the licking of stamps as a holy rite, told
people that collecting stamps requires that you abstain from premarital sex, or
sex with someone of your gender, imposed fatwas on noncollectors or threatened them
with eternal fire, terrorized children who try to collect coins instead of
stamps, tried to kill those who insulted stamps, or generally strove to insert
their sticky fingers into the public realm, then we wouldn’t need atheistic
books, bus posters or mockery. There aren’t special “stamp schools” in
the UK supported by public money, nor does one see stamp collectors given
special deference over, say, those who play tennis or prefer to read books.
There is not an organized conspiracy of stamp collectors raping children by
using their Great Authority Over Bits of Paper, with the Head Collector having
the power to cover it up.